Deeplinks Blog posts about WIPO

The meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights on the new Broadcasting/ Webcasting Treaty has just concluded and there's some welcome news for those of us in the Internet Community.

Webcasting - which was in the current draft of the treaty as an opt-in Annex - is now going to be removed from the main treaty draft, and put into a new proposal of its own, which will be discussed at a separate meeting, and proceed on a parallel slower track.

Efforts to finalize a treaty focusing on broadcasting and cablecasting in the "traditional" sense will continue on a faster track. The Chair will create a new treaty draft by August 1, which will be finalized at one further meeting of the Standing Committee. Then a recommendation will be put to the WIPO General Assembly in September to convene an early 2007 Diplomatic Conference on the "traditional" Broadcasting Treaty. (See below for the Chair's summary of the new two-track process).

The U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights Committee meets this week to discuss the latest redraft of the contentious new Broadcasting Treaty. The treaty would give broadcasters, cablecasters, and potentially webcasters, broad new 50 year rights to control transmissions over the Internet, irrespective of the copyright status of the transmitted material. It also requires countries to provide legal protection for broadcaster technological protection measures that will require Broadcast Flag-like technology mandates.

The first meeting of WIPO's Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a Development Agenda (PCDA) has just ended, amidst a last-minute flurry of activity. The question on everyone's mind is where to from here? The answer is not so clear.

After four days of discussions about interesting proposals from Chile, the Africa Group, Colombia, the United States of America and the 15 countries in the Group of Friends of Development, late yesterday the Chair asked countries to "cluster" the 50-or-so proposals currently on the table under five headings, with the goal of shaping discussions at the next PCDA meeting on June 26-30. That meeting must produce recommendations on a Development Agenda for the WIPO General Assembly.

In the afternoon of Day 2 of the WIPO Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a Development Agenda we finally got down to business: discussing Chile's thoughtful proposal on the Public Domain. Chile had actually put forward three suggestions, but it was the proposal for WIPO to undertake a study of the value of "a rich and accessible public domain" that drew comments from a slew of Member States, the Committee Chair and public interest non-governmental organizations. And rightly so. As Chile's proposal notes, the public domain is essential for ensuring access to knowledge, and provides the foundation for technological innovation.

The first meeting of the newly-created WIPO Provisional Committee for Proposals Related to a Development Agenda (PCDA) started yesterday, and runs until February 24. The PCDA is tasked with reviewing the 50 or so proposals put forward by WIPO member countries and coming up with concrete action proposals for the September 2006 General Assembly. No easy task indeed.

And then there's the politically-charged atmosphere. The meeting began almost three hours late after intense negotiations to elect a Chair that was acceptable to all countries. But when talks finally got underway in the afternoon, and countries presented their new proposals, the real issue at stake here - how to create intellectual property laws that protect human rights like access to knowledge and medicine - took center stage.